How interesting. I’m Gen-X but I use subtitles all the time. I thought it was just me being weird but it looks like many people do it.
I use subtitles because I get extremely bored without something to read. Do you use them and if so, then why?
18 responses to “Subtitles”
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” I use subtitles all the time”
A lot of the audio-visual entertainment I consume (even in English) has Polish subtitles, which I tend to…. critique a lot (really, watching a subtitled movie or tv show with a translator is a miserable experience which I recommend avoiding).
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My partner’s daughter uses them because she is hard of hearing. My partner uses them because she doesn’t want to miss any dialogue.
I acquiesce when I am with them out of love and devotion! But: I never use them when I am by myself, because they ruin a movie’s dialogue timing, especially in comedies.
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Viewing habits? Older generations watching cable TV (with less subtitles, at least in some places) while younger generations watching content on online platform, with content that is deceitfully more “diversified” and with more subtitles? What is missing here is where those numbers come from.
I am a young X, like you. As a kid, I had two choices: watching everything in French (original or dubbed) or English (without subtitles). My son, a Z, I guess, watches everything online in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and what not… but always with subtitles in French. Now, I also use subtitles all the time.
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I’m about the same age you (in my late 40s) and I use subtitles around half the time I watch TV. I use them for a couple of reasons:
1) My husband and I watch a lot of British shows and sometimes we miss words with heavier accents.
2) Lately, I’ve noticed that music and background noises (traffic sounds etc) overpower the dialogue. I read an article relatively recently that notes that “sound imbalance” is actually a widespread problem and has something to do with how digital technologies enable shortcuts that save time (and I assume labor) but that also degrades the ability to “layer” sound (i.e. make background noise quieter than the dialogue).-
Oh, fascinating! I’ve never been able to deal with background noise well– in video or IRL, but over time my tolerance for video (TV, movies, internet) has declined drastically. I assumed it was because my hearing was deteriorating subtly with age… even though the same is not true of in-person settings, and I’m still instantly awake the second anything gently goes “tink” in the kitchen at night.
Maybe it’s not my ears after all!
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Yes. I had a very similar experience. Generally, I have very sensitive hearing. Like you, a small noise in a different room can wake me. So my inability to pick out dialogue was frustrating and I wondered also if my hearing was somehow deteriorating. Turns out “it’s not us; it’s them”. 🙂
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What a relief!
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We use subtitles some of the time, depending on what we are watching. We use them if it’s a show that has loud moments (think, battle scenes, dragons roaring, type of thing) that will annoy our kids who are trying to get to sleep – our house is not terribly soundproof. It gets annoying to keep turning the volume up for dialogue and down for action scenes, so we often just keep the volume low and put subtitles on. As someone else said, I noticed that the subtitles mess up the comedy timing though. For other types of shows (reality TV, sitcoms) we don’t usually need the subtitles.
I have an issue with English SDH subtitles, though, which include audio descriptors such as “[door slams shut]” or “[dramatic music]”. I get that these may be helpful for deaf people, but I would love an option to have English dialogue-only subtitles because I find the audio descriptors very distracting.LikeLike
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I use them often. I read a thing recently that suggested that modern streaming shows are mixed (often) for theater and high-end stereo systems. That results in the dialog getting lost in all the explosions and dramatic music and such – if you don’t have 23 speakers around you at optimum places. That made me feel slightly better and slightly less “deaf gen-x”…
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Sound is absolutely a huge problem with anything recent. I mostly watch older stuff, but I would not hesitate to turn on the subtitles if I mostly watched new stuff.
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Sorry, meant this to be a reply to “occasional reader.”
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Early 30s. I use subtitles if I’m watching something foreign and I don’t mind it, and if I’m in a situation where I can hear what’s going on I’d be open to using them, but by and large I don’t use them. Like Robert, I find they ruin timing. Reading and listening at the same time becomes distracting, and it just doesn’t work for me if I’m watching in English (or if I’m watching in a language I’m trying to improve oral comprehension in; I just cheat and read the subtitles.)
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I use subtitles frequently, basically for a combination of reasons already given by others: wanting to watch at low volume; making sure not to miss things despite heavy accents from actors; worries about interference from other sounds in the program. I also watch a decent amount of stuff in languages I don’t speak so I am used to subtitles generally.
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It depends on whether I’m watching for information or entertainment.
If it’s information, then I don’t want subtitles unless I suck at the language (or just don’t know it at all), and otherwise I prefer to speed up the audio to around 2.5x to 3x.
If it’s entertainment, then it has to be something incredibly good for me to want to bother, as I don’t really have time for much entertainment. (Finding out that something threw tarps all over your mental furniture will do that to you.)
I haven’t really mentioned it, but I do have a bit of a film background from decades ago, and I don’t really like subtitles messing up what I feel is the mise en scene intended by the director.
So I only do subtitles when I’m stuck with distracted observation of entertainment.
But it’s weird and inconsistent: I like the subtitles in Godard’s “Alphaville” especially since the mechanised raspy French of the “Alphas” can be difficult to understand.
Even if all they’re saying most of the time is “occupied” and “free”. 🙂
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